


fucking frozen wonderland

by esama



Series: Ironsicle [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Blood, Comic Book Science, Corpses, Gen, Hypothermia, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Unsound Medical Practices, nothing's really graphic though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 01:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10426284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: Tony is left stranded in Siberia





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【铁人中心】Fucking Frozen Wonderland / 去他妈的冷酷仙境](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10577613) by [Oni_Miko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oni_Miko/pseuds/Oni_Miko)



> Unbetaed

Tony lays the individual pieces of the armour out and mentally catalogues the damage.

Repulsors are mostly shot, overall structural integrity is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30%, and the arc reactor is in two pieces in its chassis, all but melted into the metal surrounding it, completely unsalvageable. The fact that it hadn't just blown up and killed him is a down right miracle. What he is left with is three hundred pounds of busted bits up metal and burned circuitry and not much else.

"Well," Tony murmurs and sits on his knees on the frozen floor. No matter how he looks at it, he can't see a way to make it fly again. It's dead, beyond dead, a heap of extremely expensive scrap metal. "Shit."

For a moment he just sits there, feeling angry and miserable and cold. Captain America's shield is sitting not ten feet away from him and he can't help but look at it and glare.

Then he gets up and leaves the destroyed suit and abandoned shield behind.

* * *

 

The half an hour he spends outside in the frigid Siberian night isn't worth it. The Quinjet is long gone, and however Zemo had gotten to the base, it didn't seem to have involved a convenient plane or helicopter or even a car for Tony to use. All there is now is frozen wasteland all around the place, no hope of a quick get away vehicle anywhere in sight.

Tony goes back inside. Dressed only in the under suit he isn't exactly equipped to take on sub zero temperatures. Especially not as he is, bruised and battered and possibly with a twisted, if not a broken ankle.

The base is dead too. Somewhere in the fight, they managed to break through enough walls to cut some very important cables, it seems, and so the base is dark and cold and getting colder. The power is still running – turns out there is a fucking nuclear generator in the belly of the place – it just isn't reaching anywhere.

Problem is, Tony's hands are getting too cold and too shaky to try and fix it. The base hadn't been all that warm to begin with, kept hovering just at freezing temperatures to conserve power, and now that the heating and ventilation have been cut off...

He spends some time looking for residential area of some sort, any sort, in hopes of finding some clothes. The Iron Man under suit is designed for the complete opposite of heat retention – it gets hot and sweaty in the armour, and the under suit is there to make it easier, not worse. So he leaks body heat, with no hope of easily or quickly regaining it in the cold HYDRA base.

There is nothing though. The base is stripped clean of everything useful – except for fucking medical equipment, there's plenty of that. The best he finds is armoury with some bullet-proof vests and those aren't exactly helpful.

In the end, he has to resort to the morbid.

"Heil HYDRA and all that," Tony says under his breath as he wrangles the first dead, frozen super soldier out of the cryo chamber. Getting the guy's clothes off with the man frozen stiff is not exactly easy – but it's infinitely easier than freezing to death. The guy is wearing a tank top which is pretty useless – but it's his trousers and boots Tony wants anyway.

They're cold when he puts them on, and too big all around. The guy's boots are three sizes too big, and even colder.

Still better than freezing to death.

Uneasily Tony turns to the other soldiers. None of them are doing anything as sensible as wearing shirts with sleeves, but they all got trousers – and with enough tank tops on top of another, it would be better than nothing. Might as well get as much use out of them as he can, he thinks grimly, and goes about stripping them all.

* * *

 

Trying to reconnect connect power with broken high voltage cables while the power is still running is not exactly the safest thing in the world to do, especially without the proper safety equipment. In the end, Tony doesn't even try and instead tries to run power from the part of the base that still has power using lower voltage cables stripped from around cryo chambers. Its... a slow process.

And he's getting both hungry and tired. Fresh from two battles, freezing his ass off, and doing hard manual labour has that effect on you. Even with his cobbled together clothing – pant legs do not good sleeves make – he is wearing out, fast.

He keeps working, stripping wires and connecting cables as well as he can with now aching fingers, running them slowly towards where he needs power the most – a control centre with what he hopes to god is a working radio. Its morning and he's been at the damn place for 12 hours by the time he manages it

"Come on," Tony mutters after he's done wiring the power up and the radio crackles to life with buzz of white noise. "Come on, just give me this, just once let luck be on my side."

Luck is on his side – or rather luck had been on his side.

Because when he'd blasted the silo door to keep Barnes from escaping, he'd neatly hit two birds with one plasma blast – and destroyed the antenna along with the hinges. And being almost thirty years old secret HYDRA base, the place is completely off the grid. No telephone, no internet, nothing. Radio was all it had – and Tony himself destroyed it.

For a moment Tony just sits there, breathing. He's hungry, exhausted, hurting and still bitterly furious – and he has no way to call for help. And the only people who even know where he is are people who don't have any particular reason to look for him. And Sam Wilson – who is in prison.

"Shit," Tony murmurs, running shaking hands over his face. He's so fucking mad he's not even sure who's he mad at. Mostly himself and at the fucking HYDRA and maybe a bit at Steve for destroying his arc reactor, for turning his suit to scrap metal.

He manages to hold it together maybe for ten seconds – and then he throws the ancient radio equipment off the table in fit of wordless rage, watching with hot, angry satisfaction as it crashes in the concrete. The casing cracks and the white noise dies.

The heat dissipates quick, and Tony is again left cold. "Oh fuck," he mutters, staring at the broken radio on the floor. "Oh _shit_."

No, he can fix it. He knows he can fix it – hell, he can rebuild it. He has all the parts right there. It's not all lost yet.

But, without the antenna, what use is it?

Tugging hard at his hair to try and clear his head, Tony breathes and thinks. Maybe he can cobble some communications together from Iron Man's remains...

With bitter taste on his tongue, Tony gets back up and goes back to work.

* * *

 

Four hours and he has nothing. When Cap had taken out his targeting, with it had gone communications. Maybe, if he had a week and proper tools he could cobble something together... but he doesn't have a week. Even with all the melted snow in the world to drink, he probably doesn't have more than few days.

"This is not how I planned going out," Tony murmurs to himself, rocking back and forth in hopes of getting warmer. He could try and fix the heating – but what would be the fucking point? It would take precious time and all it would change is that he'd die warm rather than cold.

"Think, you miserable bastard, _think_ ," Tony whispers, blowing hot air to his hands to try and warm them. "You've been in worse situations than this, just think it through."

There is lot he could've done – if he had, say, several tons of his own technology to recycle. Sadly the HYDRA weren't subscribers to Obadiah Stane's outreach program, and what tech in the base isn't even just twenty or thirty years old – it's closer to sixty. Its a old nuclear missile silo, repurposed by HYDRA in early 90s for their Winter Soldier program. The newest tech there is the cryo chambers and those are...

Tony lifts his head slowly.

"No," he then says. "No, that's stupid, that's ridiculous, what am I thinking?"

Normal humans can't do cryogenic freezing, not without ice crystals forming and destroying their cells, killing them by freezer burn. It takes a super soldier with their goddamn super body fluids to survive the process and while Tony is super-something, he's not superhuman.

... he does have five dead and still frozen super soldiers though.

"Oh, _ew_ ," Tony says into the echoing silence of the HYDRA base.

His only option aside from that is to sit tight and wait for rescue. And its been already about 18 hours.

Swallowing, Tony gets up again. It wouldn't hurt to... to prepare, just in case. He wouldn't have to do the thing, he could wait until the last moment for rescue and if it never came...

Shuddering slightly, Tony goes back to work.

* * *

 

At least the base's medical is well stocked.

Tony uses gurneys transport the five bodies there, deeply grateful he doesn't have to actually drag them around. There he straps them down and then does what he can to pitch the bodies upside down at as steep an angle as he can. It gets progressively more and more morbid to work on them, as Tony wipes their necks clean and then, shuddering, hooks catheters to their carotid arteries.

Thankfully, super soldier blood doesn't congeal – and it doesn't spoil. At least Steve's doesn't – if Steve donated blood, you could keep the stuff in room temperature for years and it'd still he viable. Tony is hoping these guys are the same.

It's so grisly, though. Tony feels a little like a serial killer or something, draining blood from corpses. It's just not something a superhero should do, probably.

There's no time to think about that, though. He has work to do. For one he needs to warm up the medical enough to unfreeze the Winter Soldiers enough to turn their fluids back to liquid – and then he needs their medical files. With luck one of them would be viable donor for him and he could do whole blood – and if not he'd need to separate the blood. In either case, he needs power in the medical to get their equipment going.

So he leaves the Winter Soldiers dripping and goes to get the cables he ran to the control centre. Rerouting the power is at least a bit easier this time with the cable already done, but it still takes him better part of an hour. 20 hours now, and counting.

Tony rigs up a make shift heater by running a current by through some naked wiring – it's fire hazard but faster than trying to get the ancient boiler working. Then, with the Winter Soldiers slowly melting, he tackles the computers in the medical.

* * *

 

It's all a bit theoretical.

He'd talked about it with Bruce once upon a time. Hulk's thing is strong enough that single drop of blood was enough to give recipient some side effects – actual blood transfer would cause immediate mutations. So, they'd theorised, if Steve ever donated blood, there's a good chance that the recipient might, temporarily, experience super soldier physiology-type of effects. Enchanted healing rate, increased physical strength, faster reaction and reflexes...

And, Tony hopes, that freaky thing that keeps super soldier blood from congealing and their cells from forming ice crystals.

"This is so stupid, so, so stupid," Tony keeps mumbling to himself as he waits for enough blood to drip into the awaiting bags and keeps scanning what data HYDRA had left behind about their project.

Turns out these Winter Soldiers never saw much action on the field after they'd been converted. They'd proven themselves volatile, violent and uncontrollable – so, from what Tony could tell, HYDRA had fallen into the Red Skull trap. They'd given the serum to a bunch of arrogant assholes – who's then turned into megalomaniacal lunatics. That was why they'd been abandoned, they and the project – in the end they caused more harm than good and because their serum was stronger than what Barnes got, they couldn't even be mind wiped and reprogrammed – they healed too fast.

Tony is almost grateful that Zemo had taken them out. What the hell had Steve been planning to do about them had they been alive, Tony doesn't even want to guess. He rather doubts Steve could've just up and executed them, not even for greater good.

Barnes probably could've though.

"Shit," Tony murmurs, again. The anger is fading now and he feels more frustrated than anything. Frustrated and bitter and oh god, so _tired_.

22 hours and counting – which makes it about 38 without sleep.

Maybe... taking a nap wouldn't hurt, now that he has a warm room to safely stay in. He'd be sleeping with the dead – but what else is new?

* * *

 

28 hours and counting.

Two of the Winter Soldiers are viable donors to him – one is universal donor, the other has A+ blood, so that's good too. The others are B- and one is AB-, so, it gets a bit trickier there.

Sipping melted snow water to stave off hunger, Tony works at separating the blood into parts he can safely receive. Thankfully, there's actual equipment for that on the medical room, and it its all sturdy Russian design – though the centrifuge is definitely not designed for blood donation amounts of blood, Tony can make do.

He doesn't know which part of blood is responsible for the whole anti-crystallisation effect, so, safest way to go would be to go for all of it and replace as much of his own blood with the stuff as possible. Probably.

"This is so stupid," Tony says again, for the millionth time, and prepares another bag.

* * *

 

32 hours and he's finished preparing the blood. The Winter Soldiers hang gaunt on their gurneys and with a grimace Tony pushes them out and into the cold corridor outside. No one knows if a super soldiers body can rot and he's in no particular hurry to find out.

He has four bags of red blood cells he can use, five bags of plasma and one bag of platelets. Its more than he strictly speaking needs but – at least he has extra.

All that's left is to actually do the transfusions.

Tony takes another nap instead.

* * *

 

39 hours – close to 45 without food. The hunger pains are getting worse, and water isn't helping that much anymore.

Idly Tony wonders if anyone is looking for him. Vision might be. Rhodey is in hospital with bigger things to be worried about Natasha is who knows where doing who know what, so, they're probably not even thinking about it. Pepper would send a search party, sure, but they wouldn't know where to look. Steve probably wouldn't even care and by the time anyone thought to ask Sam Wilson...

Tony drinks as much water as he can manage and tries to sleep some more.

His head is aching.

* * *

 

At 43 hours his makeshift heating coil fails and he wakes up freezing. It's while trying to fix the thing that he realises he forgot to hook the cryo chamber to power.

Getting up hurts. His head is spinning now and he feels faint with hunger and lack of nourishment. It's nothing he hasn't felt before – though it had never been this bad. Ten Rings had wanted him working, not fainting from starvation.

It had been cold back then too. The outside was warm sure – in day time. But the caves were cold before they got the furnace working and nights were always chilly. It sank into your bones, the cold.

Here it feels like it's running in his veins. Ice crystals. He wouldn't be surprised.

Shit.

His fingers register everything as pain, but he forces them to work, drawing out the cables to the bottom of the silo, where the cryogenic chambers sit.

He blacks out momentarily while working on connecting the cables and then, colder and shakier and definitely weaker, bows to the inevitable.

He's out of time and rescue isn't coming.

* * *

 

It's like some sort of joke. Winter Soldier blood feels fucking _freezing_ , going in.

* * *

 

Shaking with something far worse than slow creeping of hypothermia, Tony writes a note. It's short and succinct, mostly because his fingers are burning and a longer letter is well beyond his capabilities right now.

It details what he did to himself, in short and simple order. "If I survived, please don't unfreeze me here – take me to a hospital, preferably somewhere warm, like Malibu. And if I don't survive, please deliver my remains to the care of Virginia Potts of Stark Industries."

He signs it with his name and the date and then pins it to the glass of the cryo chamber he'd selected. Then he sheds the borrowed HYDRA clothes, sets the timer, grabs Captain America's shield and climbs inside, wearing only the Iron Man under suit. It would work perfectly with freezing effect, after all. And the shield... well.

It had seen one man through being frozen – maybe it will give him some luck. As it is, it isn't as if he can just leave it.

"God I hope it won't take seventy years," Tony murmurs as he sets the shield at his feet and closes his eyes.

There's a hiss.

Then cold.

And nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Now I know this would be very unlikely scenario and someone really should find Tony, if no one else then FRIDAY... but what's the fun in that.
> 
> Might continue this. It's just a lot of juicy potential. Heh heh.


End file.
